Liv Boyle (b. 2002) is a UK-based painter, currently completing her MA Painting student at the Royal College of Art.

My practice examines how authorship operates within painting, and how it can be redistributed between the artist, material, and object. Painting becomes something produced through negotiation, where outcomes are determined by systems I set in place rather than direct composition.

I use found objects as active components within the painting process. These elements intervene in how paint moves, pools, and settles, producing conditions that I cannot fully control. The resulting image is shaped as much by these encounters as by my initial actions, positioning painting as something negotiated rather than composed. Although they are central to production, the objects are not always presented with the finished work. What remains in the painting is a trace of their involvement: interruptions, blanks, and marks in the surface that point to an event that has already taken place. The work therefore holds both presence and absence at once - evidence of an encounter that is no longer visible but remains embedded in the material outcome.

Colour plays a key role in this process. I draw from established historical palettes and reintroduce them into new material situations to act as a record of paint’s movement. These references operate as structured sets of colour that are removed from their original context and reactivated through physical processes. This creates a tension between recognition and displacement, where familiarity is felt through colour but destabilised through form.

The paintings often assert multiple identities at once. They can be read as landscapes, portraits, as recreations of historical paintings, and as extensions of the tools used to make them, while simultaneously refusing to depict any recognisable subject. The paintings playfully challenge the boundaries between painting, object, and painting-as-object. They claim multiple identities at once while materially remaining nothing more than paint, surface, and residue.

I like to question the boundaries of what a painting is: whether it resides in the final surface, in the system that produced it, or in the interaction between material and tool. By shifting control away from direct authorship and toward constructed conditions, I aim to make paintings that are contingent, distributed, and open to multiple readings at once.